Homoglyph detector: Cyrillic, Greek and styled letters posing as Latin in names and links
Runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. Updated on 25 Oct 2026.Spoofed links and fake brand names often swap one Latin letter for a Cyrillic or Greek twin: the "а" in "pаypal" can be U+0430, which looks identical but points somewhere else. For zero-width spaces and other hidden characters, open the Invisible Character Detector, which starts with every kind ticked.
Paste a domain, username or message; only Lookalike letters is ticked under Clean.
Read the table for each lookalike: its code point, Unicode name and the plain letter under Cleaned to.
Press Clean to turn Cyrillic, Greek, fullwidth and styled letters back into plain Latin.
Press Copy cleaned to take the safe version.
Paste a domain, a username or a message to see each lookalike letter, its Unicode name and the Latin letter it imitates. Fullwidth and bold or italic styled letters are caught as well, and cleaning turns them back into plain letters.
This detector finds characters you cannot see, or cannot tell apart, in pasted text. Each one is highlighted where it sits and listed with its position, its code point such as U+200B, its Unicode name and what it does. A one-click clean removes or replaces them, and you can choose which kinds to clean.
Five kinds are checked. Zero-width and invisible characters: zero-width spaces, joiners, word joiners, byte order marks, soft hyphens, and the tag and variation characters that can carry hidden text. Unusual spaces: no-break, thin, em and ideographic spaces and line separators, which look like ordinary spaces and break searches, CSV imports and exact comparisons. Bidirectional controls: overrides and isolates that reorder how text is shown; in source code they are the Trojan Source attack (CVE-2021-42574), where code reads one way in a review and runs another way. Control characters: codes such as NULL, ESCAPE and DELETE, plus the replacement character that marks text damaged by a wrong encoding. Lookalike letters: Cyrillic and Greek letters that match Latin ones, taken from Unicode's confusables data, and fullwidth or mathematical styled letters.
A Cyrillic or Greek letter is flagged only when it sits in a word that also has Latin letters, or when every letter of the word could pass for Latin, so ordinary Russian or Greek text is not reported. Some invisible characters are legitimate: the joiners inside emoji such as family groups, the emoji style selector, and the joiners that shape Devanagari, Bengali or Persian words. These are shown as benign and kept when cleaning.
The rest of the article, and all 6 questions about Invisible Character Detector, are on the Invisible Character Detector page.
Yes. It is the same scanner as the Invisible Character Detector, opened with only lookalike letters ticked under Clean. Every paste is still checked for all 5 kinds: zero-width and invisible, unusual spaces, bidirectional controls, control characters and lookalike letters. Tick the other boxes to clean those too, or open the Invisible Character Detector, which starts with every box ticked.
In "pаypal.com" the second letter is U+0430 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A, which looks exactly like the Latin "a" but is a different character, so the name points to a different domain. Paste the link and the table lists that letter with its code point, its Unicode name and the plain letter it imitates; Clean swaps it for the plain Latin letter and Copy cleaned takes the safe version.
Usually one of them contains a character you cannot see: a zero-width space, a no-break space instead of a normal one, or a Cyrillic letter that looks Latin. Paste both strings here and the difference is highlighted with its code point, so you can clean it or fix the source that produced it.
U+200B is a character that marks a possible line break but takes up no width, so it is invisible. It often arrives by copying from websites, chat apps or PDFs. Inside a password, a coupon code or a spreadsheet cell it makes an exact comparison fail even though the text looks right.
No. A zero-width joiner between two emoji, as in a family emoji, and the emoji style selector are marked benign and kept. So are joiners between letters of scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali and Persian, where they change how the letters combine. Only characters that serve no purpose there are removed.
The tool checks Cyrillic and Greek letters listed as confusable with Latin in Unicode's security data, such as U+0430, which looks exactly like a. They are flagged when the same word also has Latin letters, or when the whole word could pass for Latin. Fullwidth and styled mathematical letters are always flagged.
Still stuck? Ask about Invisible Character Detector and anybody who knows can answer. No account needed.
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